> We are thinking of establishing the expectation that upon return from a conference or workshop, faculty would share what they learned.
There was talk at EduCon about the "Professional Learning Community"
(some group of teachers collaborating on improving practice) rather than
the individual teacher being the "unit of analysis" for gaging the goals
and impact of professional development.
To support a PLC. your PD instructor is also a team-building facilitator
and change agent consultant, and you, as an administrator, need to do
some cheerleading...but only enough to bring the people to the table,
sound the call for the importance of the topics, and check in on them a
few times. The problem with this model, of course, is that you need
someone in-house, and you need to find time for all the teachers to meet
and collaborate - and all of that is expensive.
By doing PLC professional development online, you get a lot more
leverage. Teachers are invited to join / create an online community
which will continue after the formal in-service ends. Leverage includes:
* Asynchronous communication: bypassing meeting-time problems
* Local Context: materials and discussions evolve around your team
and their issues
* Cumulative Development: materials and discussions are available
for future In-Service courses
* Transference: Teachers continue the discussion past the formal
inservice period
This would need to take place on an "Intranet" - a server controlled by
your school, so that all the work there remains available for other
teachers to join in later. This online PD environment should support,
at a minimum,
* pedagogy conversations through individual blogs and commenting
(here's what I'm doing, here's what I want to know, here's what I
learned)
* collaborative documents with a revisioning system (development and
postings of lessons and rubrics)
* document commenting (reflection on lesson plans and rubrics,
evaluation of student work)
* management of "to-do" items (to support implementation of proposed
lessons, particularly if new technology integration is needed)
* digital portfolios by class (posting of student work for
evaluation purposes)
My company uses an open source platform called Drupal to set up these
environments, but there are others. I have it on my to-do list to post
to ISED-L about Total Cost of Ownership for the various choices.
There's a trade-off between open source solutions like Drupal (which
cost nothing to licence, but require support to maintain and customize)
and commercial products(which are not customizable, but come with
support via licensing fee).
Anyone would like to see this in action, ask me for a tour of the
environment we set up (one website for planning and in-service, the
other as "sandbox" for web 2.0 classwork and digital portfolios) in the
context of an in-service in progress now.
-Bram
Bram Moreinis, Principal
The Empowered Teacher
bram@empowered-teacher.com
[ For info on ISED-L see https://www.gds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=128874 ]
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